The Parakeet, the Mermaid, and Matisse
The late-career Cut-Outs of colourful shapes produced by Henri Matisse changed the form of art and design we find in the modern world…
“The walls of my bedroom are covered in cut outs,” the impressionist painter Henri Matisse wrote in 1948, “I do not yet know what I shall do with these.”
At this stage of his life, Matisse was almost bedridden following surgery for abdominal cancer. Unable to continue to paint for long hours in front of an easel, he developed a new way of working which emerged from approaches he’d explored back in 1919 when designing the costumes and sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Les Ballets Russes production of the Igor Stravinsky opera, Le Chant du Rossignol, which debuted at the Théâtre National de l’Opéra in Paris. Then, he had explored stencil methods to develop repeating motifs for the various Chinese style tunics and most prominently in the overlapping cut-out layering for the dress worn by prima ballerina, Tamara Karsavina.
Having Matisse design for the ballet set a trend for many other experimental artists who would also design for major, mainstream theatre productions, among them were his contemporary, Pablo Picasso…
